ACTION ALERT

One by One

Seven of those best-selling flavors made OCA’s list, too—our list of flavors that tested positivefor glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.

By now, most conscious consumers know that Ben & Jerry’s has been scamming consumers with its claims of caring about the environment and getting money out of politics.

You can’t claim to care about the environment, and still source your milk from farmers that use pesticide-drenched GMO grains to feed their cows. You can’t claim to care about the environment if your supply chain is a major source of water pollution.

You can’t claim to care about getting money out of politics (no matter how much free ice creamyou promise) if your dairy farmers are buying all their seeds and toxic chemicals from Monsanto—a company that spends millions to buy offpoliticians and regulators.

Case in point: One of our members recently reported asking Feather River Food Co-Op in Portola, California, to stop stocking Ben & Jerry’s. She spoke with a store employee, and here’s what she reported back:

This store had never carried Ben and Jerry's ice cream until a sale flyer came out from their main co-op supplier, NCG, (National Co-operative Grocers) listing Ben and Jerry's pumpkin cheesecake ice cream as a sale item on the flyer. She and her assistant decided to stock a small supply of just that flavor for the sale ad. Soon she was hearing from customers (besides me) that there were problems with Ben and Jerry's Ice cream company, perhaps even more than the glyphosate. Soon they pulled the three that were left. She has told me they do not plan to sell this product in the future. I hope someone from OCA has contacted the NCG.

That’s what we call a victory. Now we need to replicate that victory all over the country.

Can you help? It’s easy. Check out this listof natural food stores and co-ops. If your local store is listed, please contact the store and ask it to dump Ben & Jerry’s!

Let’s get every natural food store and food co-op to stop selling Ben & Jerry’s—even if we have to do it one by one!

Politics On Your Plate

When the EPA says it’s okay for your food to contain toxic pesticides and other chemicals, that’s political. And when a new administration comes in and overturns a ban—one that consumers fought long and hard to obtain—on a chemical like chlorpyrifos, known to cause brain damage in kids, that’s political.

When the Farm Bill dishes out huge subsidies for GMO commodity crops but does little or nothing to help organic regenerative farmers who improve the soil and provide high-quality nutrient-dense food, that’s political.

When the USDA rolls back safety protections for factory farm workers, that’s political.

And when corporations and their billion-dollar lobbying firms are allowed to make big donations to political candidates in exchange for policies that make your food “cheap” but damaging to your health, that’s political, too.

Like it or not, politics and the quality and safety of your food are intertwined. That’s why we’ll be urging you in the coming year to not just pressure the federal government on food and farming policy, but to get involved locally.

We’ll ask you to survey your local and state candidates on their views on pesticide use in foods, and the use of local and organic food in your town’s schools and hospitals.

We’ll ask you to ask your candidates what they plan to do to support local farms, how they will help build out local and regional organic food hubs to promote local food sovereignty and strong local economies.

We’ll ask you to build the Regeneration Movement, from the ground up, in your cities and counties and states.

And as always, we thank you for supporting our work. You are the food movement. You will drive the progress, from the grassroots up. Thank you!

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup®, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy. Documents recently made public as a result of multiple lawsuits filed against Monsanto by people who blame exposure to Roundup® for their non-Hodgkin lymphoma suggest Monsanto has known for decades about the health risks related to glyphosate.

But as the authors of this latest study point out, glyphosate is not the only ingredient in herbicides like Roundup®—it’s one of multiple ingredients. Those other ingredients make glyphosate-based herbicides even more dangerous than we thought—and should lead to a global ban on all glyphosate-based herbicides.

According to Prof. Gilles-Eric Séralini, one of the authors of the study:

These results show that the declarations of glyphosate as the active principle for toxicity are scientifically wrong, and that the toxicity assessment is also erroneous: glyphosate is tested alone for long-term health effects at regulatory level but the formulants – which are composed of toxic petroleum residues and arsenic – are not tested over the long term. We call for the immediate transparent and public release of the formulations and above all of any health tests conducted on them. The acceptable levels of glyphosate residues in food and drinks should be divided immediately by a factor of at least 1,000 because of these hidden poisons. Glyphosate-based herbicides should be banned.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Real Farming

What do you do if you don't like the conference going on down the road? You start your own, better, conference.

Regeneration International’s Oliver Gardiner recently caught up with Nessie Reid, program director for the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) in Oxford, UK, who shared a little history of the ORFC conference, an “antidote” as she calls it to another farming conference held nearby every year, one that focuses on the industrial agribusiness model.

As you might have guessed, the ORFC is planned around promoting an organicregenerative food and farming system.

(Note: Due to a technical glitch, this week’s video is brought to you in two parts).

But sometimes you need a little boost, in the form of high-quality supplements. The kind you can trust.

If you’d like to support a company that’s aligned with your values, and also get great supplements and other organic products at a great price, we’ve got good news. Through midnight February 15, 2018, get 20 percent off a wide range of Mercola products.

Plus for every item you purchase using this promo code, ORGANIC118, Mercola will also donate 20 percent of the product price to OCA.